Mobile-Friendly Website Test

This shouldn't come as a surprise...Google is going through a major change in how they rank websites.

Google changes their algorithm hundreds of times a year, but most changes are minor. This change, however, is one of the "major" changes. Google recently announced they were underway with their long-foretold mobile-first search index change. If you aren’t prepared, the mobile-first index could result in a major change in your search engine rankings. If you want to keep your ranking, you need to be prepared before Google implements their mobile-first indexing.

The good news:

Google has a tool for youto test your website.

Why the change?

Today, everyone has smartphones with them, constantly communicating and looking for information.

The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. The version that's not mobile-friendly requires the user to pinch or zoom in order to read the content. Users find this a frustrating experience and are likely to abandon the site. Alternatively, the mobile-friendly version is readable and immediately usable.

Requires no redirection for users to have a device-optimized view, which reduces load time. Also, user agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site’s user experience (see Pitfalls when detecting user agents" section for details).

Saves resources when Googlebot crawls your site. For responsive web design pages, a single Googlebot user agent only needs to crawl your page once, rather than crawling multiple times with different Googlebot user agents to retrieve all versions of the content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of your site’s content and keep it appropriately fresh.